...did anyone download it while it was up? Would save me a bunch of time dealing with individual county registrars offices if someone could put this up as a torrent or something.

Getting public records anonymously is fairly common. It's not like I show ID when I pick up my records. Now days I usually don't even have to pick them up -- email or ftp is common, someday I hope to get a torrent link as response to a records request.

I can't think of a single UI change Firefox has made in years that I liked. Some I've hated; some I'm indiferent to.

I don't like that FF still has performance issues compared to Chrome. Doesn't crash like it used to, though.

But the occasional ad on the new tab page didn't really bother me.

IMHO it's actually an example of the right way to do advertising. It was non-intrusive, it was differentiated enough from other content that you could tell it was an ad without being distracting. It usually contained something at least vaugely relevant and not boner pills and hot milfs. And it helped pay for something useful without costing me cash. If the internet obeyed simliar principles I wouldn't need an ad blocker.

Apparently I'm the minority.

Of course, I really only use it nowdays for firebug and a couple of other things when I'm doing dev or troubleshooting or whatever.

That might be the bigger problem for Mozilla: make me care enough about your browser to hate it sometimes.

...are the two problems this paper is facing.

They're using Blox CMS from an outfit called TownNews, which is a division of Lee newspapers. Blox is a CMS/PAAS that focuses on newspapers. It is closed source, but is built with PHP and uses MYSQL (or MariaDB maybe). It employs a proprietary templating language called UTL that uses syntax that reminds me a bit of Django templating.

Blox is a very good news CMS. I've used a bunch of them. I don't love any of them, but Blox is the best.

You can modify Blox pretty much any part of Blox, there's no real lock in.

The issue is that there's likely no one in the nesroom who can actually do it.

Major metro newspapers will often have a handful of news focused developers. A newspaper the size of the one in this story is lucky to have a minimally competent IT guy keeping the paper's network up and all the desktops running.

The paper as a whole is probably struggling to keep the lights on. It's not going to contract custom software development.

...isn't the severance package or the B.S. clause about availability. The problem is that they laid off their U.S. staffers and replaced them with outsourced IT from India. The severance clause was just the peanut chunks atop the turd sandwich, and the bank isn't doing anything about that.

Facebook is already make or break for news sites. Operations I've worked with get anywhere from 40-60+ percent of their traffic from Facebook. Facebook already has too much market power in this sector. News operations that go along with this idea are slitting their own throats.

GW lost all my love when they went all patent troll (copyright troll?) over the phrase 'Space Marine.' Not Adeptus Astares, mind you, but Space Marine.

Federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains really good numbers on relative number of deaths in various occupations. You can find the latest numbers here: http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi...

The FBI also releases a detailed report of pigs killed every year. You can find it listed as "Law Enforcment Officers Killed and Assaulted" as part of the annual Uniform Crime Reports program. It's on the FBI website.

And the malice comes from experience.

I wish this app would increase the death rate, but I don't think it will help. The death rate for pigs is lower than that for garbage men, and an order of magnitude below truly dangerous jobs like loggers and commercial fishermen. Every time a pig dies I feel a little safer, and I only wish something as simple as an app could help in that regard.

Around 100 pigs are killed every year. About half of those die in accidents, mostly car wrecks. We really need to improve on that number. With a little effort we could be killing at least two or three hundred every year.

Verizon and the rest of the cable/telco cartel have succeeded in extorting rents from Netflix, so now they have no need for an alternate service. A content play was never a natural move for Verizon. Much easier and much more profitable to simply shake down the two or three leading streaming services -- but until they were able to do that, having something like Redbox streaming was an important part of their threat.

Redbox streaming likely only existed to use as a threat: "nice little business you've got here. Pity if anything started happening to your deliveries and our company took all your customers."

...but I'm finding it hard to really get too worked up about.

We are planning to buy almost F-35s at a price of approx. $188 million per. This is a plane that in the words of Rand corp (hardly an anti-military outfit) "can't turn, can't climb, can't run" well enough to dogfight.

We are planning to buy a total of 10 Ford class aircraft carriers, at a cost of more than $11 billion per ship. The Chinese seem to think they can neutralize our carriers with cheap ballistic missiles and attack subs. Lots of experts think they may be right. But even if they aren't that will leave us with twice as many fleet carriers as the rest of the world combined.

Compared to that, I think a million bucks to study the life cycle of memes is a bargain.

That's actually a really good point, and it's been a pain point for me for years without realizing the why of it.

But then you go and ruin it with this: To cover a span of 1" or 24mm.

1" = 25.4mm, IIRC.

I got a cheap drill press from Harbor Freight for $56 on sale.

...for the affluent. Wondeful. I'm so sick of California.